


Subterranea: Another Path

by disgruntled_owl



Series: Subterranea [2]
Category: The Borgias (2011)
Genre: Ancient Rome, M/M, Masturbation, Roman Myths, Statues, Underground
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 03:28:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12572736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disgruntled_owl/pseuds/disgruntled_owl
Summary: A companion vignette for Subterranea. Micheletto and Cesare part ways in the subterranean passages beneath Rome, where each faces a hidden mystery. While Cesare confronts his thirst for violence, Micheletto encounters a manifestation of his own suppressed desires.





	Subterranea: Another Path

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Arithanas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arithanas/gifts).



Perhaps  it was unwise to leave Cesare alone underground, Micheletto thought.  Mere minutes had passed since they had separated at the subterranean fountain, but in a place buried for millennia, time had no meaning.  Mercenaries like him skulked through these ancient tunnels, and they would sooner slay another trespasser than ask his name.  Cesare would not have known this place existed had Micheletto not pulled up the cellar door in the pillaged palazzo above ground, eager as a hound presenting his master with a fresh kill. Now his master was on his own, unarmed,  perhaps  in danger.

He stopped and inhaled, drawing in smoke and stagnant air. He could go back. But he needed to find a way to the surface, without which this gift to Cesare would be useless. Cesare could also likely handle himself.  In darkness and torrential rain, Micheletto had  witnessed  Cesare’s first kill and had seen a grace and decisiveness in the young man’s strike that many _condottieri_ lacked. The young cardinal had not hesitated for a moment, even when his victim’s pulse pounded in his ears. Micheletto’s own first kill had not been so elegant.  That night, he had been grateful that the downpour hid his burning cheeks, his pang of envy, his bittersweet admiration.

Micheletto gazed at the black ceiling of the vault and listened for footfalls or carriage wheels in the world above, but only heard the crackle of his torch.  In his mind, he tried to conjure a mental map and place the palazzo and these tunnels within the scheme of the quarter. This passage could not be far from places he had already been.  He had drummed his fingers on the exposed skulls of Christians stacked against catacomb walls, and he had knelt by hidden cisterns, drowning evidence in their eerie cerulean waters. He had killed here and left bodies to molder besides men who had died centuries earlier. Still, his torch revealed no familiar signposts, no graffiti or ruins to point the way. For now, he would have to follow this tunnel to its end.

He came upon a gate, which separated him from a staircase that descended into a stone grotto. The iron bars had turned brittle and rusty, and the gate yielded  easily  when he lifted it off its hinges. Its fragility struck Micheletto as a bad omen.

The walls of the grotto below  were marked  with chest-high recesses, each containing the remains of a stone bust. Micheletto circled past them one by one and found that each had  been cracked  like an eggshell. Some had split down the center, leaving but one eye and half of a mouth. Others had missing faces; on still others, nothing but the neck and jaw remained. This wasn’t the work of time, Micheletto mused, but a sudden act of violence.

He turned and cast light on the center of the room, uncovering a strange configuration of marble limbs and torsos. The whole mass stood several heads higher than he. As he moved closer, his foot struck a dense piece of metal. He rested his torch in an alcove and crouched down to retrieve the object. A hammer, no doubt used to lay waste to the busts lining the walls.

Micheletto raised his eyes and his flame, and the shape of the statue became clearer. A nude warrior arched over the body of a young comrade. From beneath a plumed helmet, he gazed  mournfully  at the sky. The young man beneath him, also naked, had  been draped  across a rock, a jagged gash over his heart. A halo of tight curls spread out around his peaceful face.  His grieving protector clutched the young man’s hand to his breast, the youth’s slender arm brushing his thigh.

The sight of them left Micheletto stripped and vulnerable.  The sculptor had imbued the soldier's face with an anguish that broke through his lined, world-weary exterior.  This stranger had shaped the soldier's hands, which would have  been gnarled  and calloused, to be gentle enough to caress his companion.

Something glimmered in the gloom near the floor. Micheletto knelt down and saw delicate golden letters at the base of the statue. It pained him to not be able to read them. Who had made this thing? Who were these men?  The emotion the sculptor had instilled in them betrayed something more than friendship: something forbidden, especially for warriors.  Some ancient inquisitor had come with the hammer to destroy them; had their impossible beauty stayed his hand?

The act of dropping down had brought him close to the figure of the young man. His body formed a languid curve, from his thighs to his belly to the flare of his ribcage. Firelight undulated across his smooth, pale skin, beckoning Micheletto’s touch. He gripped the tops of his thighs and listened for intruders, or worse, Cesare. It would be easier for him to kill a stranger than to try to explain the sinful sensation stirring in his chest.

The grotto remained as still as before he entered.  Micheletto reached forward and stroked the young man’s face, shuddering as his hand brushed over his lowered eyelids and the swell of his lips.  He wondered if in life this man's curls had been the same chestnut color as Cesare’s; if his eyes, when opened, brimmed with the same determination.

Emboldened by the silence, Micheletto pressed down harder as he moved his hand along the figure’s throat, down his chest, and over the perfect plain of his abdomen. He swallowed hard as a fresh heat rose to his face and neck. If only he could be the soldier, mournful because he knew what it meant to lie in his companion's embrace. It would be sweeter still to be the youth, laid out below, a sacrifice to the man he loved.

Micheletto leaned in and placed one hand on the bed of stiff curls below the figure’s tilted head. He let the other drift along the man’s iliac crest, down to the penis resting on the cool slope of the inner thigh. He imagined the stone flesh beneath his hands softening, growing warm. The mouth blooming red. The eyes opening, revealing a familiar gaze from which he would not have to look away. His hand moved from the statue and closed around the manhood swelling beneath his clothes. Freeing himself, he braced against a shapely shoulder and stroked his cock, grunting softly as he himself grew firmer and harder.

In the distance, Micheletto heard a loud clash. The marble in his hands turned ice cold, and he sprang back against the wall and covered himself. Cesare’s voice echoed through the tunnels like a chorus of bells.  His shouts were unintelligible, but there was a bellicosity in them that chilled Micheletto’s blood.  A crimson image of the statue—the grief-stricken soldier, the splayed out corpse—flashed in his mind; once a temptation, now a dreadful portent. With his torch in one hand and his dagger in the other, he abandoned the entwined figures to the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> The statue in the grotto is inspired by Jean Baptiste Roman's statue Nisus and Euryalus (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisus_and_Euryalus).


End file.
